The Whole Truth or Anything But

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This guest post comes to us from Anne Yoder. Anne is the former books editor of KGB Bar Lit. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, BlackBook, PopMatters, and elsewhere. She moonlights as a pharmacist in the West Village.

In Bomb magazine’s interview with Aleksandar Hemon following the publication of his book of short stories The Question of Bruno (2000), Hemon speaks at length about the similarities between the novel and the history book – “both provide models to organize the practice of human life… the only question being what details are chosen” – as well as the tendency to read his fiction autobiographically, since he often crafts fictional yarns that include details from his remarkable life. This interview precedes the notable memoir scandals of recent years, where authors had the opposite problem: their “true” stories veered too far into invented territory, and many of the significant details they chose to include never really happened at all. A recent occurrence, this time involving the entirely fictionalized memoir Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones (aka Margaret Seltzer), caused Patrick Lane of the Missouri Review to speak against the furor, pointing out that “the cries of outrage at a memoirist’s ‘lies’ bespeak a general distrust of or even disdain for fiction.”

Vladimir Brik, the narrator of Hemon’s recent novel, The Lazarus Project, would likely agree with Lane’s assertion. Brik, who like Hemon was born in Sarajevo and now calls Chicago home, takes note of the high regard Americans hold for stories that contain facts and concrete details. In Sarajevo, the function of story-telling was far different: amusement and pleasure outweighed veracity; a boring tale would be judged more harshly than one that takes great liberty with the truth. Vladimir grows nostalgic for Sarajevo where, “If someone told you he had flown in a cockpit or had been a teenage gigolo in Sweden or had eaten mamba kebabs, it was easy to choose to believe him; you could choose to trust his stories because they were good.”

In Chicago, Vladimir disappoints his wife with his missteps in American-style storytelling. Whereas their friends give mundane accounts of the ways they fell in love, he fails to provide the details of their own romance. Instead, he attempts to inject levity by telling a tale of lust-filled rabbits separated by the Berlin Wall, who would fall in love with the scent of rabbits on the other side, and how during mating season they would congregate at the wall’s base, issuing “pining rabbit sound[s]” and making the guards on both sides “very trigger happy.”

Playful exaggeration like this rubs up against the dour insistence on the real time and time again. Telling stories in America requires a certain propriety of not straying too far from expectations. And so, it seems that Hemon attempts to respond to these expectations in the novel’s two narratives, both of which find a basis in real-life stories. The first concerns the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was killed by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. Lazarus shows up at Chief Shippy’s house with nothing but an empty envelope, but Shippy believes Lazarus is an anarchist who intends to do him harm and shoots out of fear. The murder is covered up by the police, who introduce fictional details to corrupt the investigation.

The second thread mirrors Hemon’s life, as Vladimir researches the life and death of Lazarus Averbuch in order to write a book. The story follows Vladimir’s grant-funded journey through Eastern Europe with his good friend Rora, a photographer, ostensibly to learn more about Lazarus. Hemon doesn’t attempt to mask the many ways that Vladimir is a stand-in for for himself and Rora for his childhood friend Velibor Boović. Like Vladimir and Rora, Hemon and Boović traveled through Eastern Europe funded by a fellowship in order to research this book. And Boović’s photos from this trip are interspersed between Hemon’s chapters. In essence, Hemon embraces the real in order to exaggerate and manipulate it, irretrievably blurring the distinction between real and invented, autobiography and fiction.

John Edgar Wideman’s latest novel, Fanon, is close kin to The Lazarus Project. It too deals with a novelist who researches the past – in this case the Martinique-born psychiatrist, activist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-61) – in order to write a book about Fanon’s life, an undertaking he uncannily refers to as “the Fanon project.” The narrator is a novelist by the name of John Edgar Wideman, with Wideman’s mother and his incarcerated brother, Robby, playing lead roles. Despite the invented circumstances, one gets the feeling that these characters remain true to the identities of their real-world doppelgangers. The Fanon narrative, which reads more like a reflection on his life, acts to anchor the sprawling, sometimes-surreal encounters that include a conversation between Wideman and Jean-Luc Godard. With little in the way of transition, the scenes skip from the narrator’s walks along New York’s East River, to Wideman’s mother gazing over the streets from her balcony, to visits with his imprisoned brother, and to the hospital where Wideman’s mother finds Fanon on his deathbed. Wideman muses on the hierarchy of fact versus fiction more openly than Hemon, and speaks directly of his desire to defy categorization. He sets fiction against nonfiction in a struggle for dominance: “Stipulating differences that matter between fact and fiction–between black and white, male and female, good and evil–imposes order in a society. Keeps people on the same page. Reading from the same script. In the society I know best, mine, fact and fiction are absolutely divided, one set above the other to rule and pillage, or, worse, fact and fiction blend into a tangled, hypermediated mess, grounding being in a no-exit maze of consuming: people a consuming medium, people consumed by the medium.”

What does it mean when, in the same year, two of our country’s gifted fiction writers publish novels preoccupied with reality? Is this a triumph of the dominant form, evidence of a weakened imagination, or a response to our culture’s hyperawareness of the division between fact and fiction, reflected in the outrage at memoirs outed as fictitious and the obsession with reading “true” stories. I suspect it’s a combination of all three, even though both authors, I imagine, would defend their novelistic ideals. The very fact that our fiction writers consciously confront the real is evidence of nonfiction’s influence; we can no longer ignore the gray sea between. Or perhaps the answer lies in admitting that this sea exists.

In Fanon, Wideman writes about his frustration with categories – “fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, science fiction or romance, hello or goodbye… those categories one might say, are what I’ve been writing about, or trying to write my way out of, not only the last few years, but since the beginning.” In Fanon and The Lazarus Project, both Wideman and Hemon realign the boundaries of fact and fiction, and in the end make them more elastic. With book reading on the wane, one wonders if the tizzy made about such distinctions isn’t just an anxious distraction from the greater underlying issue of who will read these books, regardless of the content, as Wideman’s brother, Robby, states: “I don’t know why you keep beating yourself up trying to write intelligent shit. Even if you write something deep, you think anybody wants to hear it. Everybody out there just likes the guys in here. Everybody just wants out. Out the goddamn slam. Quick. Why they gonna waste time reading a book… So when I think about it, big bro, I give you credit for being an intelligent guy, but, you know, I got to wonder if writing an intelligent book’s an intelligent idea.”

Anne K. Yoder
is a staff writer for The Millions. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She currently lives in Chicago, where she's at work on a novel. Read more of her work here: http://annekyoder.tumblr.com.

"To start with, look at all the books."
This is how Jeffrey Eugenides opens his novel The Marriage Plot, and it may as well be the opening of my life. I am surrounded by piles and piles (and, seriously, piles) of books. In my office, my bedroom, the bathroom. My girlfriend's always annoyed with the stacks that appear as if by magic on our living room coffee table. She counts them, and then says, "Fourteen books? Really?"
Well, I want to say, yeah. Really. Fourteen books. What do you want from me?
So in the interest of proving the worth of all of these piles, recently I've been writing essays about them. Some of them I've published. My essay "The Art of the Epigraph," published a few weeks ago right here on The Millions, came out of my desperate ploy. Now, I'm turning my attention to opening sentences. Why? Well, first, because I have a prodigious and unembarrassed passion for opening sentences. But also: Look at all the goddamn books.
I tend to prefer opening sentences that get right to the point, so I'm just going to state right off the bat that this essay intends to analyze a handful of opening sentences from classic to recent novels and examine their effects. Opening sentences have long fascinated me, so much so that I've even made a point to memorize the beginnings of most of the books I read. This is what I do with my time. If possible, I love opening sentences even more than epigraphs. If I were ever a contestant on Jeopardy!, and "Opening Sentences" popped up in one of the blue boxes, I would destroy that category.
Like any reader, when I pick up a book, I open it and check out the first words. I'm not looking for anything specific. Actually, what I love about opening sentences is the complete lack of rules, how each writer gets to decide how best to guide a reader into their narrative. A writer, after all, is the instructor for the experience of their own work, and the opening sentence––after the book design, title, and epigraph––is among the reader's first impressions. Opening sentences are not to be written lightly.
But how do they work? What's makes a good one effective? Is there a better way to do it? Or is it a creative free-for-all?
As a teen, I became enamored of the 19th-century standard: that of the Grand Declaration, a way of establishing the high themes of the work. We know these openings by heart: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," from Tolstoy'sAnna Karenina; "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," from Austen'sPride and Prejudice; and, of course, Dickens's "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…" from A Tale of Two Cities. When I first came upon these novels, these declarations thrilled me, as they implied high-mindedness, a lofty ambition of subject, even if that subject was treated satirically, as in Austen's case. The absolutist vibe they gave off made the work itself feel chiseled into rock, as if each word were crafted to unimpeachable perfection. As a fledgling novelist, I now see the malleability of fiction, its fluidity, how it is never as hard as stone, how, at most, it only appears that way. The Grand Declaration has, thankfully, mostly fallen out of fashion, though our reverence for these famous sentences persists. They're great lines, to be sure, but readers know by now that a novel is a perfect place for moral, emotional, political, and spiritual investigation. We don't need to be cued into the game so directly.
Later, writers offered increasingly subtle and idiosyncratic opening lines. Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself," expressed a woman's small claim of autonomy. Ken Kesey established the mood of paranoia of authority in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with, "They're out there." J.D. Salinger distinguished his novel's famous protagonist from a particular famous protagonist of the past with the honesty of his voice and the statement contained in the opening:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Contained in each of the above sentences is something crucial to the novel it opens, all without stating it outright. Much can be accomplished in seemingly straightforward prose.
It would be easy to think of opening sentences as somehow representative of the rest of the book, as exemplifying some quintessence of the novel's aims, but this isn't––and shouldn't––always be so. Take D.H. Lawrence'sLady Chatterley's Lover, which opens with, "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically," and goes on to describe the state of life after WWI. The pronouns here­­––the first-person-plurals "our" and "we"––are not used in the rest of the book, which stays firmly in third person. The line immediately following this section is: "This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position." The switch from first- to third-person places us squarely into the mind and story of Lady Chatterley, and makes us, because of their aberrance, remember those lines as we read on. Does the "tragic age" remain tragic? Or, as Doris Lessing puts it, will "England…be saved through warm-hearted fucking"?
Jumping ahead a number of decades, let's examine another work in which the opening line is far from representative of the style to follow. Jonathan Franzen'sThe Corrections starts with curiously ill-fitting grandness: "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen." Isolated, this is a wonderfully evocative opening, but once I read the rest of the book (which is utterly fantastic), I wondered about those first lines. They now seemed such a transparent attempt to elevate the book to classic status. On my second read, I came across this lit bit of dialogue from Chip, about his unsold and pretentious screenplay:
"My idea," Chip said, "was to have this 'hump' that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something offputting at the beginning, it's a classic modernist strategy. There's a lot of rich suspense toward the end."
Is Franzen being meta here? Is he acknowledging the ill-fitting language of his opening when set against the "rich suspense" of the rest? It's hard not to see Chip as the closest character resembling Franzen himself, who, before publishing The Corrections famously worried about the direction of the novel in his Harper's essay "Why Bother?" He writes:
I resist, finally, the notion of literature as a noble higher calling, because elitism doesn't sit well with my American nature, and because even if my belief in mystery didn't incline me to distrust feelings of superiority, my belief in manners would make it difficult for me to explain to my brother, who is a fan of Michael Crichton, that the work I'm doing is simply better than Crichton's.
Is The Corrections, which marked a significant shift in Franzen's style, his way of leaving his past behind? Of declaring a new ambition for fiction? Maybe the following bit of dialogue captures how Franzen felt about his former fiction, and maybe about difficult social fiction in general: As Chip's girlfriend (who couldn't make it all the way through his script) leaves him, he tries to convince her of the opening's value: "You see, though," he says, "the entire story is prefigured in that monologue. Every single theme is there in capsule form––gender, power, identity, authenticity––and the thing is…Wait. Wait. Julia?" Though Chip's argument is probably reasonably founded, no one really cares about prefiguring themes in capsule form. Readers aren't necessarily looking for structural innovations or cerebral thematic overtures. More likely, they're looking, as Franzen himself wrote, "for a way out of loneliness."
I do not mean to suggest that great, classic novels can't begin simply and straightforwardly, in a style that is illustrative of the novel it opens. In fact, it's the more common practice. But that fact does not diminish the power or the greatness of any work. Dostoyevsky'sCrime and Punishment, for instance, gets right into the story, like the thriller it is: "Early one evening, during an exceptional heat wave in the beginning of July, a young man walked out into the street from the closetlike room he rented on Stoliarny Place." From there, we are thrust into the mind of Raskolnikov and his murderous, immoral descent. Any other kind of opening would have been unnecessary.
A novelist teaches the reader how to read the novel, and along the way they express innumerable opinions about their view of literature in relation to this one work. Dostoyevsky didn't believe that Crime and Punishment needed a conspicuous opening. (It needed a quotidian introduction with hints of aberrance. The "exceptional heat wave" (implying tension, heat, murkiness, anger) pops out of the routine, and so although Raskolnikov attempts to act naturally and arouse no suspicion, the reader knows––subtly, maybe inexpressibly––that something is amiss. (Regular life, this isn't.) But Dostoyevsky did think his incredible short novel Notes from Underground ought to start ostentatiously: "I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man." You do not get any grander than that.
In other words, a portion of our measurement of an opening line's efficacy must be contextual. How does it set up what follows? From what perspective is it written? Where does it take us? And yet, it must also be judged completely on its own, for if a novel starts slowly, unpromisingly, no one will want to continue. Inserting something "offputting" at the beginning, despite what Chip thinks, is generally a really stupid idea.
Two of the best novels of last year open with sentences that are simple, straightforward and representative of the whole, and they both get right to the point. Meg Wolitzer's beautiful and funny novel The Interestings begins like this: "On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time." Simple, direct, yet enticing––suggestive of a history about to unfold. See, this is an opening aimed at both establishing the focus and the narrative. The Interestings are nothing more than a group of artists who meet at a summer camp in 1974 when they're fifteen and sixteen years old. They named themselves The Interestings. Still, with this sentence Wolitzer imbues a sense of grandeur––a kind of historical importance––to the story of these friends as they age, as they wax and wane in their careers, and as they struggle to stay together. They all grow up, eventually, but when they first met, when they were teens, they believed they were important, destined for fame, fortune, critical respect––and the opening sentence reflects that.
Eleanor Catton's whopper of a masterpiece, the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries, is set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and its language harkens back to those big Victorian novels. It is undoubtedly a tale––no other word for it––with rousing adventure and ridiculously complex intrigue and mystery. It also features an enormous cast and a narrative that moves through all of their points of view. How does one begin such a novel? How does a writer set the style, hint at its high population, and yet still retain the enigmatic air of a tale? Here's how Catton answers those questions: "The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met." Pretty perfect, right? In this short, direct sentence, you've got the large cast (twelve men), the period and atmosphere (smoking room), and the air of mystery: why have these men met? Do they know each other? Who are they? But Catton does one better with the next sentence:
From the variety of their comportment and dress­­––frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill––they might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway––deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.
Come on! How masterful is that stretch of writing? How evocative, how eloquent, how, how…inviting. As soon as I read those words, I knew I would read all 834 pages of The Luminaries, and quickly. And I did: I blazed through it at (at least) a hundred-and-fifty-page-a-day pace. Everything in the novel is, like Chip's screenplay, "prefigured" in that opening. Except here, Catton's work is so sly, so skillfully wrought you'd have to read the whole thing to even begin to understand how expertly Catton guided you as a reader.
Catton, by the way, is twenty-eight years old.
Both Wolitzer's and Catton's openings skirt grandness and express no overarching theme directly. They are elegant and direct, but that doesn't mean they are only accomplishing one thing. Often the most artful way to communicate something is when it is couched within ostensible artlessness.
Then, of course, there are the allusive openings, the ones that, to use a crass verb, borrow from the work of their forebears. Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle references what is perhaps the most famous opening line ever, "Call me Ishmael," from Melville'sMoby Dick. Melville's line, more than simply being famous, is also one of the most complex (and economic, at three words). First, this narrator is talking to us, and in a friendly, almost conspiratorial way. Second, someone asking you to call them something usually means it's not their real name, so "Ishmael" appears a tad suspicious. Third, the reference to the Biblical Ishmael (son of Abraham, half-brother of Isaac, ancestor of the Arab peoples) hints at our narrator's exiled status.
Vonnegut plays a great joke on Melville's line in Cat's Cradle: "Call me Jonah. My parents did. Or nearly did. They called me John." Again, the same direct, conversational tone toward the reader; again, the discrepancy between given name and chosen name (except here, we're given his real name); and again, the Biblical reference. And that's the great joke: the Book of Jonah tells the story of a man who is––you guessed it––swallowed by a whale. Vonnegut's Jonah, through his adventures on the mysterious island of San Lorenzo, gets swallowed by much bigger whales––religion and politics.
Zadie Smith's allusive opening of On Beauty isn't nearly as cheeky as Vonnegut's (after all, how many people in the world are as cheeky as Vonnegut?). Her novel begins: "One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father," and proceeds to do just that. This is an update of the opening of E.M. Forster'sHowards End, which goes: "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sisters." Smith's is a respectful nod, a deferential ode to a writer "to whom," she writes, "all my fiction is indebted." But Smith goes one further: her protagonist is named after Forster's titular house, and, considering what happens to Howard in On Beauty, Smith's novel may have borrowed Forster's title as well, with one addition: an apostrophe between the d and s in Howards. (Instead, Smith borrow her title from Elaine Scarry's essay "On Beauty and Being Just.")
Allusions are risky, as they can fall flat very easily. I've seen numerous stories that, for example, open with something similar to Kafka's famous, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect," from The Metamorphosis. Most of these referential lines are just plain bad. Recently, Haruki Murakami showed that a writer could tackle Kafka's famous sentence with wit and originally. His story "Samsa in Love" from The New Yorker takes this approach: "He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa." Now that's interesting. In Kafka's time, the idea of changing into a bug was novel, terrifying, and confounding. We're used to such a premise by this point. Now, our great terror would be becoming a Kafka character.
But, you know, that's Murakami. Most writers aren't as imaginative.
And last but not least are those openings that provoke, that immediately stun a reader with brutal frankness. Philip Roth'sSabbath Theater is a dark, twisted novel, full of sexual explicitness and moral ambiguity, and Roth wastes no time letting a reader know this: "Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over." This ultimatum comes from Mickey Sabbath's mistress, and it aptly captures the strange, strict limitations sex and love can force upon us, even when they are "maddeningly improbable." Roth really does his reader a favor––if you're not comfortable with this level of candidness, this isn't the novel for you. Because, oh yeah, it only goes down (or up, depending on your view) from there.
Toni Morrison'sParadise famously provides immediate and heartbreaking shock: "They shot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." The massacre at the Convent sets up the complex and tragic tale of Ruby, Oklahoma, an all-black community. We never learn who the "white girl" is; she joins the list of millions––billions, even––of the anonymous dead. Morrison, no stranger to frankness, is particularly good at opening her books. A Mercy: "Don't be afraid." Song of Solomon: "The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock." And, of course, Beloved: "124 was spiteful." Morrison's prose style is one-of-a-kind, and her ambition––to, in part, "work credibly and, perhaps, elegantly with a discredited vocabulary"––has more than been met, surpassed, even stunned into submission. These opening lines are her first punches.
I probably fetishize opening lines because, well, I'm a reader and a writer. As a reader, a really wonderful opening line makes me giddy with excitement. I nestle myself as deeply into my couch as I can go, and I accept the deal the novel has offered me. Yes, I will read the rest of you. You've earned it. As a writer, the opening line is the purest, most unadulterated part of a work. Before it, the blank page. After it, the whole of a story, a novel, a book. It is the division between nothing and something, the bridge between emptiness and fullness, between something in your head and something on the page. The opening sentence is the first utterance of life, the initial gasp of air that birth forces out.
Perhaps this would be better expressed through what is perhaps my favorite opening line from a recent novel. Colum McCann'sLet the Great World Spin revolves around Philippe Petit's incredible guerilla tight-rope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, and this is how it starts: "Those who saw him hushed." The image of Philippe Petit does not need to be described here, though a beautiful image it undoubtedly is. McCann wisely focuses our attention to the people on the pavement. Their hush is full of more beauty than any description ever could be. This accurately captures how I feel about a great opening––hell, about great literature in general: it's amazing and unbelievable, and although there is so much you can say about it, sometimes all I can do is shut up and witness.
Image via Thunderchild7/Flickr

2 comments:

When it comes to stretching the truth or downright fabrication in memoirs I am reminded of one of my favorite books of all time: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.Scholars believe the revolutionary made up much of his story.

I don't think you would be so flip if you understood that fiction masquerading as fact is what gets a lot of innocent people killed, viz. American history over the course of my lifetime, at least. But as long as it's entertaining, right? That's all you people care about and that's precisely what is wrong with this world.

And James Frey's problem is that he's a shitty writer and too dumb to understand that being a fraud is his subject matter, not a roadblock to getting published and raking in all of those ducats. If he was smart he would make that the foundation of his "writing," or whatever it is that you want to call what he does.

Yeah, I know, I know, I totally misread the post, and that's not what you're saying and so on, and if I had the reading comprehension of a teenager I would've read what you wrote and parsed your message with a little more grace and understanding than I have. But I read what you wrote and what you wrote I find sort of ridiculous. The line between fact and ficition is slowly becoming erased, and I find this dangerous. Henry Kissinger was a better storyteller than Robert Coover, and what of it? Am I supposed to give him a pass because his erudition and way with a tale is a good as any master novelist? Forget about the millions of people who died because he knew how pass a lie off as fact? Is that what you're asking? Because that's what it sounds like.

“It’s the great un-American novel,” he’d say, or “It’s a novel pretending to be a memoir that’s really a history.” Sometimes he’d simply say, “Nothing like it has ever been written.” The more he spoke, though, the more I worried, because the book sounded not just indescribable but unwriteable.

Emails are circulating among various current and former students from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop expressing concern over the University of Iowa's new "Open Access" policy with regard to theses. These include MFA theses, which, according to our own Workshop grad Edan, might typically consist of a "book-length manuscript... poems, short stories or a novel (either completed or partially completed)." She added, "I turned in a bunch of stories, and I might not have included a couple if I knew they would be made public online...they were experiments more than anything, writing by a student."For creative writing students (and their colleagues in Iowa's creative non-fiction MFA), of primary concern is that MFA theses will be "freely available over the internet at no cost to the enduser, and can be located via search engines such as Google." In so many words, their fiction, poetry, and non-fiction will be given away for free before they have the chance to get it published, thus wrecking opportunities for remuneration and resume-building.As is so often the case with these thorny technology issues, however, we should take care not to paint the situation with too broad a brush, otherwise we run the risk of sounding shrill and out of touch, while progress marches inexorably onward.Lest any concerned Workshop grads think that Iowa is pulling a fast one, the history of the Open Access movement in acedemia is long and not without controversy. The Wikipedia article on the topic places the seeds of the movement as early as the 1940s, long before Google became a favorite bogeyman of those wary of technological advances. Admittedly, however, the movement really took hold at the advent of the internet, when the fruits of Open Access could be realized in full. Peter Suber, an academic who is one of the more prominent voices on Open Access, defines it in its simplest terms as follows: "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." In academic communities, Open Access has potentially huge importance, allowing scientists and scholars to easily gain access to the work of their colleagues. After all, scholarship in nearly all fields is built upon the work of scholars that went before.Of course, the Iowa writers are arguing, with creative work, the calculation is different. Writers learn from reading other writers, but a novel doesn't cite previous novels explicitly. Ernest Hemingway doesn't direct his readers via footnote to Sherwood Anderson, for example. And so, the Open Access framework would appear to be flawed when it comes to theses produced by the students in the Iowa Writers Workship, as it is both irrelevant to their discipline and potentially damaging to their future careers.At the same time, it would seem to me that the Iowa Writers Workshop, and any MFA programs that follow the same practice, do their students a disservice by deciding to call their students' culminating works, "graduate theses." In the academic world, terms like this have concrete meanings, and there are - sometimes unwritten - rules that govern their usage. Perhaps it would be too much too suggest that calling the final projects of MFAs "theses" is overcompensation by programs that have an inferiority complex when compared to the more grounded academic displines, but Iowa and other programs should be aware of these rules in the first place. There is also the ever-present argument that we are in a digital world, and aspiring writers need to think creatively about working with the openness and freedom that the internet offers, even in the face of potential copyright confusion. At the same time, and at Iowa especially, universities should be cognizant of the peculiar requirements of creative fields and strive not to do any harm to their students' futures by with blanket, unnuanced policies like the one that Iowa is attempting to force on its MFAs.Bonus Links:Iowa's "First Deposit Checklist" for theses and dissertations where Open Access has become mandatory. (pdf)Dan Wickett digs a bit more into the details of the Iowa controversyEarthgoat posts some of the emails that have been circulating among Iowa alums. See the comments for subsequent emails and further discussion.Megan Pillow gets comments from a handful of prominent Workshop grads at HuffPost.Open Access backer Peter Suber offers some very useful analysis of the issue on his blog.